Annual intelligence funding is a must

The successful operation that eliminated Osama bin Laden has been widely praised for bringing together a vast array of intelligence resources to meet a single vital goal. This success highlights the need for robust congressional oversight to ensure that we learn from our successes, just as much as we need to learn from the past failures that gave rise to modern congressional intelligence oversight.

There is tension between our open society and the need for intelligence. The American people demand transparency in their institutions. Yet secrecy is critical to the work of gathering intelligence and protecting the country. By providing strong and effective oversight, the congressional intelligence committees act as the trustees of all Americans.

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That strong and effective oversight is difficult, if not impossible, without an annual intelligence authorization bill. Congress must get back in the habit of passing that bill every year — and that needs to start now, with the 2011 bill.

The oversight committees were created in the 1970s, in the aftermath of a series of troubling revelations about intelligence activities — ranging from covert programs to assassinate foreign leaders to collecting information about the political activities of U.S. citizens. After these scandals, Congress and the American people lost confidence in our intelligence community and in the previous congressional oversight system.

The House and Senate intelligence committees were created to rebuild that trust. They now must take on an equally strong role to reinforce our reinvigorated operations.

With their unique access to some of the most sensitive activities in our government, these committees have multiple roles. They are watchdogs, making sure past abuses do not recur. Just as important, the committees work to ensure our intelligence agencies do everything they can to protect us and spend the taxpayer dollars in their classified budgets wisely.

The annual intelligence authorization bill is the committees’ most important tool for conducting meaningful oversight of the intelligence community’s sensitive activities on behalf of the American people. It provides a unique opportunity to review and to make changes in the spending plans and activities of all U.S. intelligence.

The bill is the essence of the “power of the purse” that Congress uses as a check and balance on executive power. Unfortunately, from 2005 until 2010, Congress failed to pass an intelligence authorization bill.

To be sure, the intelligence agencies still received their funding from Congress, via the annual appropriations bill but without the policy guidance and oversight that come in the intelligence authorization bill — essentially, money with no strings attached.